Before we get to this week’s topics, we wanted to let you know that the SC2 team is hard at work this week and are in the process of finalizing the changes for a balance update which will be coming next week. More info on the specific changes will be coming early next week, but some of the things we’re looking at for the next update are:

Addressing the issue of making large numbers of air units difficult to micro.

Combining mech ground and air armor upgrades.

More balance changes throughout the game

Thank you again for your constructive discussions and help around this area. We’d like to point out once again that the majority of the changes in our beta balance updates couldn’t have happened without the collaboration with our community.

Now let’s talk about various topics that came up this week, and some of our next focus areas.
Map diversity in Season 3
We have seen the many discussions both for and against pushing map diversity quite heavily in this new tournament and ladder season. Although there haven’t yet been many highest level games played on these maps, our team has also been keeping a close eye on the last Homestory Cup/Kespa Cup/GSL games that were using the new maps.

Our initial thoughts agreed quite strongly with those of you who were pointing out the cool and unique strategies that players devised. The matches in Kespa Cup, for example, showed a wide array of varying build orders and strategies that we normally could not have seen if the map pool was standard.

In terms of playing the game on these maps, our playing experience is also in alignment with those of you who are saying that it’s just really fun being able to explore, locate, learn, and execute new strategies on the ladder.

Overall, we strongly believe in the direction of continuing map diversity in the future, but please also keep in mind if any of these maps do turn out harmful to the game, we will be taking measures to make fixes and/or remove the map mid-season in the more extreme cases. Compared to only using standard maps there’s just a higher risk of something like this happening, but we strongly believe the benefits of map diversity outweigh this potentially small risk.

Bridgehead PvZ Zerg all-in
We saw a lot of players jumping to quick conclusions regarding how there is an all-in that Zerg can do that is unstoppable by Protoss. We saw the strategy performing well at Homestory Cup, but in Kespa Cup it was stopped by two different players both times the strategy was executed. We’re not trying to jump to any quick conclusions right now due to the strategy still being quite new, but from the games so far, it definitely doesn’t appear to be unstoppable.

We’d like to remind everyone that because the cool factor of map diversity is so important to the longevity and fun factor of StarCraft II in terms of both watching and playing the game, it’s important to stay open-minded and not be too quick to jump to such extreme conclusions. We really need to give new and unique maps a fair chance before making conclusions on how good or bad a map is.

However, one quick note regarding this topic is that the map creator wanted to make a change to the back door Line-of-sight blocker area to allow the defending player to see melee units attacking the rocks, so we’re currently looking to make the requested change and republish the map.

Cyclone
The bad news here is that the direction we talked to you guys about last week turned out to be completely wrong when we play-tested the changes. Therefore, we will not be able to get out changes to the Cyclone for the next patch. The main reason this direction didn’t work out was due to the higher damage and same range in the late game. With these stats, the Cyclone was just countering too many things. We saw this especially against Protoss, who generally have higher cost units – a Terran who was just massing Cyclones took care of almost every unit Protoss could use.

The good news here is that since then, we’ve been exploring a new direction internally and it’s looking more promising. Where we’re currently at is something like this:

Cast range is always 7, and max distance is always 15.

Lock on is broken if vision is lost.

There are 2 weapons now:

Ground weapon – Lower damage than current.

Air weapon- Much lower damage to start off with so that air harassment units can still come into play. From there, air harassment units could be shut down by Cyclones or they could be microed well to still deal a lot of damage.

New upgrade to the Cyclone is to add more damage to both types of attacks (other upgrades are now gone). Once completed:

Ground weapon is stronger than now.

Air weapon is similar to now.

The general reasons here were:

Completely removing the anti-air capabilities was probably too big of a nerf.

We want to see the micro on both sides on both ground and air units, especially when the unit counts are smaller in the early/mid stages of the game.

Adding the vision requirement to the ability will make Cyclone’s interactions around ramps or zero ground vs. air units will be more interesting.

And the micro here will be for the air units to utilize zero ground area well to get away.

Please keep in mind that thes changes are not final and we’d love to hear your thoughts in this area as well.

Medivac upgrade
We agree with the majority of you in that the current Medivac upgrade isn’t the direction we should be pursuing. It’s a heavy combat add especially in cases where both ground and air units are chasing a bio army, because Terran players can lift up the whole army and land them on a different terrain level without much of a sacrifice. We believe that what we need here instead is something that encourages even more harassment play in the late game, but something that doesn’t buff the bio army in combat. Therefore, our current idea here is to change this upgrade to increase the speed boost duration.

Carrier Interceptor behavior improvement
Thank you for your suggestion regarding how Interceptors behave. We agree with you guys that it might be more interesting if Interceptors on their way back to the Carrier can be more responsive when the player issues another attack order right at this moment. We have put this on our task to try it out internally sometime in the future.

We want to thank you guys once again for the continued engagement and support in both Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void, and we’d like to also give a shoutout this week to all the pro players who have been exploring and executing new strategies in the new maps! Thank you.